Suchergebnisse

Intro -- Acknowledgments -- Contents -- List of Figures -- List of Tables -- Chapter 1: Introduction -- 1.1 The Puzzle -- 1.2 Previewing the Argument -- 1.2.1 Dictator's Growth Curse -- 1.2.2 Taming the Curse: Authoritarian Institutional Change -- 1.3 Plan of the Book -- Bibliography -- Part I: A Theory of Authoritarian Institutional Change -- Chapter 2: Why? A Dynamic Theory of Power and Plenty under Dictatorships -- 2.1 Quis Custodiet Ipsos Custodes? Self-enforcing Nature of Authoritarian Institutions -- 2.2 Introducing Dynamic Inconsistency -- 2.3 Authoritarian Weighted Voting and Dictator's Growth Curse -- 2.4 Concluding Remarks -- Appendix: Derivations -- Deriving Time-Separable Payoffs -- Bibliography -- Chapter 3: How? The Dictator's Divide-and-Rule Strategy -- 3.1 (Un)committable Divide-and-Rule Strategy -- 3.1.1 Benchmark -- 3.1.1.1 Elite's First Best Effort -- 3.1.1.2 Elite's Problem -- 3.1.1.3 Elite's Participation Constraint -- 3.1.1.4 Dictator's Contract Design -- 3.1.2 Pure Explicit Scheme: -- 3.1.3 Pure Implicit Scheme: -- 3.1.4 Commitment Problem and Choice between Explicit and Implicit Schemes -- 3.1.4.1 Commitment Constraint -- Stage: Reneging Constraint -- Stage: Effort -- Stage: Scheme Design -- 3.1.4.2 Commitment Problem and Political Discounting -- 3.1.4.3 Full Commitment Ability () -- 3.1.4.4 When the Commitment Constraint Binds () -- 3.2 Taming the Curse -- 3.3 Conclusion -- Bibliography -- Part II: The Era of Institutionalized Authoritarian Rule and Dictator's Growth Curse: A Case Study on China's Trade Policymaking -- Chapter 4: Authoritarian Institutions, China Style -- 4.1 Two Perceptions of China -- 4.2 Reciprocal Accountability and China's Authoritarian Institutions -- 4.3 Incentive Structure I: Bureaucrats -- 4.3.1 Career Path for China's Political Elite in China's Political Pyramid.

This paper evaluates the progress and impact of the literature on comparative authoritarianism, showing not only how its development over the previous two decades can help us understand China's authoritarian politics better, but also how the latter can move the former forward. We focus on two important topic areas in the literature: authoritarian power-sharing and autocratic politics of information (e.g., partial media freedom and government censorship). For the first topic, we shall review the literature on the authoritarian power-sharing between dictators and their allies and explicate how this conceptual innovation helps us understand the institutional foundation of China's regime stability and phenomenal economic performance before Xi Jinping. The analysis then provides us a baseline for assessing China's economic and political future under Xi Jinping given his clear departure from the pre-existing power-sharing framework. Finally, this paper also assesses the relevance of the literature on authoritarian politics of information to the Chinese context. In sum, we not only emphasize the conceptual contributions of the literature of comparative authoritarianism to the field of Chinese politics, but also identify lacunae in the current literature and avenues for future research that post-Xi political developments have made visible to us.

The emerging political economy literature on dictatorial media politics rationalizes the cross-country variation in media freedom by dictators' demand for truthful information. Since a dictator can always punish the media for their truth-telling ex post, concerns of being punished could induce self-censorship and undermine the dictator's promise to media freedom. We study a formal model that brings the dictator's commitment problem to the fore, and characterize situations in which the commitment problem is especially severe. Our analysis suggests that neglecting self-censorship would lead to underestimating the amount of missing information in autocracies as well as overestimating the autocrats' level of tolerance for criticisms and authoritarian responsiveness. Based on the comparative statics, we contend that the variation in media outlets' quality and penetration can be leveraged to recover missing information due to self-censorship.

Who is more influential in shaping citizens' health-related behaviors, experts or politicians? We conduct five conjoint experiments on 6,255 residents of France, Germany, Spain, the United Kingdom, and the United States, asking them to evaluate COVID-19 vaccines alongside randomly varying endorsements from national politicians and medical professionals. In every country, our results show that citizens are more likely to rely on medical professionals, the experts, more than on politicians when choosing a COVID-19 vaccine. Even after accounting for citizens' political alignment with the government, our evidence reveals that politicians play a very limited role in shaping vaccine acceptance. These results have implications for the role of political elites in shaping people's behaviors amid a large-scale crisis.

AbstractThis paper aims to answer a general question: whether an international organization (IO) is able to shape public opinion in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. Since the pandemic took hold in early 2020, countries across the globe have switched gear from prevention to vaccination. Most had to not only secure a sufficient supply of vaccines, but also to curb vaccine hesitancy among their populations. Can endorsement by an international organization like the World Health Organization (WHO) enhance a vaccine's acceptability? Based on a survey experiment conducted in Taiwan, our study leverages the special relationship between China and Taiwan to show that WHO endorsement can induce acceptance of Chinese vaccines among Taiwanese people. However, the effect is found to be contextual in the sense that it only works when people's trust in the WHO is higher than their trust in the vaccine's country of origin. Our study not only contributes to the literature of IO legitimacy by empirically showing IOs' causal effects on public opinion, but also sheds light on how a vaccine's credibility can be enhanced to promote vaccination uptake.

Changing collective behaviour and supporting non-pharmaceutical interventions is an important component in mitigating virus transmission during a pandemic. In a large international collaboration (Study 1, N = 49,968 across 67 countries), we investigated selfreported factors associated with public health behaviours (e.g., spatial distancing and stricter hygiene) and endorsed public policy interventions (e.g., closing bars and restaurants) during the early stage of the COVID-19 pandemic (April-May 2020). Respondents who reported identifying more strongly with their nation consistently reported greater engagement in public health behaviours and support for public health policies. Results were similar for representative and non-representative national samples. Study 2 (N = 42 countries) conceptually replicated the central finding using aggregate indices of national identity (obtained using the World Values Survey) and a measure of actual behaviour change during the pandemic (obtained from Google mobility reports). Higher levels of national identification prior to the pandemic predicted lower mobility during the early stage of the pandemic (r = −0.40). We discuss the potential implications of links between national identity, leadership, and public health for managing COVID-19 and future pandemics.